Mozilla has pushed out the initial release candidate of Firefox 3 for download.

The new Firefox code of the firmís increasingly popular web browser is available in 45 languages as a public preview for developers, as well as anyone else who fancies tinkering around with Internet Explorerís closest rival.

Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for nearly three years.

The Mozilla Foundation said it has made more than 14,000 updates to the platform. Improvements include better performance, stability, rendering correctness, memory usage, code simplification and sustainability, said the firm.

It also reckoned that web apps such as Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3, compared to Firefox 2.

Meanwhile, a major bugbear for many freetards people who use the browser has been with Firefox 2ís somewhat weak handling of bookmarks, history and preferences that too easily succumb to data loss. Mozilla said that Firefox 3 would be less susceptible.